This is the third post in my series on the metaphysics of race. If you want to start at the beginning, you can go right to the introduction to the series, or you can go to the full list of posts with links. 

The next view on our list is anti-realism. In metaphysics, an anti-realist view is just a view that denies the existence of something. An anti-realist about immaterial souls thinks there are no such things as immaterial souls. They think such souls are not real. An anti-realist about morality thinks morality doesn't exist. So an anti-realist race denies that there are any race. To be clear, this is not the same as rejecting biological races, because you could think races exist but are not natural kinds. Anti-realists reject races of any sort. There just aren't any races.

Why would someone hold such a view? Isn't it obvious that people fall into different categories along racial lines? Well, remember from the last post that people thought races to be biological kinds or natural kinds. Then science turned out to seem not to allow for such biological races. If races are biological kinds, and there are no such biological kinds, then there are no races. That is the most fundamental metaphysical argument for anti-realism about races, although as we will see there are other arguments (and not all of them are metaphysical).

Anti-realism about race is the denial that anything in biology matches up with our social classifications of race, and therefore there are no races at all. The language we use to talk about races isn’t really talking about anything at all. It’s all a mistake. There are no races, and we don’t refer to any existing entities when we talk about race. One response to this argument is to see races as social constructions or social kinds. We will come to that view. Another is to try to defend racial categories as biological but not in the classical biological realist view from the last post, and we will get to that also. But I want to look at the arguments given here first for not believing in races at all.

​The Argument from False Views

This view usually relies on the notion that our social groupings do in fact treat races as biological categories, but they don’t turn out to be biological categories. If that’s right, then our common understanding of races is wrong, and there are no groups that match up with what we think races are. If we think races are biological, but there are no biological races, then the things we call races don’t exist.

Here is one worry about some of these arguments, though. A false belief about something that has social reality doesn’t make the social reality non-existent. Our categories of attorneys, political libertarians, and licensed motor vehicle operators are not biological categories. Even if races are not biological, could they be more like those categories? Those categories don’t involve such false beliefs, whereas our category of race might, so that’s one difference. But other social categories involve false beliefs, and we don’t take the thing in question to be non-existent. We didn’t reject heat when we stopped taking it to be some substance that warms things up but instead took it to be faster motion among particles. We just revised our understanding of what heat is. We did reject a concept that people had about heat that they called caloric, which was supposed to be the substance that heats things. We rejected any such substance, so we said caloric doesn’t exist. But we kept heat. We don’t talk about caloric anymore. We do talk about heat. And we talk about race. So if we reject biological races, is race more like heat or more like caloric? The fact that we do talk about it suggests that it's more like heat.

We also revised our notion of an atom, once we concluded that the things we’d been calling atoms were in fact divisible. Atoms were supposed to be indivisible. That’s even what the Greek word means. We’d been calling them atoms long enough that revising our language would have been too much of a change, so we just reconsidered the nature of the things we’d been calling atoms, and we no longer think of atoms as indivisible. We still believe the things we called atoms exist. We just no longer think of them as impossible to be broken into smaller parts. Similarly, we might think the things we were calling races do exist, but they’re not the biological kinds people once took them to be. They’re social kinds. So the arguments against races might not be arguments against races but arguments against biological races.

The Argument from Vague Boundaries

Another kind of argument against race comes from difficulties in figuring out where the boundaries are and figuring out where difficult cases fit in. Naomi Zack is a philosopher who worries especially about this. She has ancestry from several different backgrounds – black, white, Native American, Hispanic/Latina, and perhaps some more that I’m not even aware of. So what race is she? It doesn’t seem like she belongs to a race at all. Does she belong to multiple races, just one race, or none at all? Her own answer is none at all, but that’s because she thinks no one belongs to any races. But part of her argument against racial categories is that she doesn’t think hard cases like her make sense.

Is this a good argument? Aren’t there lots of categories where we have no trouble believing that there is such a category, even if it’s hard to figure out what to do with borderline cases? For example, football and basketball are clearly sports. Golf and bowling seem much less central to what we consider sports, but most people would include them. What about croquet or mini golf? What about chess? Now we’re stretching it a bit, right? Is high-stakes poker a sport? But clearly attending a concert is not a sport. Nor is texting someone. There are clear cases, and there are borderline cases, but there are also things that are definitely not sports. So the existence of borderline cases that are not so clear does not invalidate the category. There are things that are clearly sports, things that are clearly not sports, and things we're not so sure about. That's not evidence against the existence of sports. It's evidence that the boundaries of what counts as a sport are unclear or vague.

And a lot of our categories are like this. Is there a sharp line between the tall things and the not tall things? Is there a clear boundary between the things that are red and the things that aren't? Is there one grain of sand that makes a difference between a pile of sand and something that is not a pile of sand? Of course not. There are difficulties with vagueness in philosophy. I took a whole graduate seminar on the topic. But it's a much more pervasive problem about our language, our logic, and our categorizations in general. It's not something particular to race categories. Unless we want to use vagueness to reject a whole bunch of things that we normally have no problem with, we shouldn't be using it to reject the existence of races.

That doesn’t mean all the hard cases of racial classification should be easy. And it doesn’t mean there are races. But it does mean that the existence of unclear cases is not a good reason for questioning the existence of races.

Changing Race Criteria

Zack also points to the fact that the criteria for race membership can change from place to place or over time even in the same place. It might even turn out that several rules for how we assign people to races contradict each other. She thinks that that’s actually true about race classification in the United States. I’m not so convinced that any one practice of racial classification is internally inconsistent, but there are certainly practices of race classification that conflict with each other, and some of them operate at the same time as each other but for different purposes (and often by different people, e.g. the standards of the KKK, the standards of colleges in terms of affirmative action categories for admission, and the ordinary beliefs of most people may all be operating in a given city block, but different people are still using different standards for different reasons).

Does this mean there are no things that we can call races? Or does it just mean that there might be different kinds of things that we could call races? I don’t see how it rules out the second. Especially once we see the social kind view, we will see how there can be several kinds of races all at once, and we just mean different things by the terms we use at different times. But on that view, all of them exist, just like the categories of college students, Uber drivers, convicted felons, and professional athletes all exist, and we might sometimes mean different things by those terms at different times.  For example, laws might change about what counts as a felony, and it might be retroactive to make a former felon no longer a felon. Similarly, laws can change about what race someone is classified as for federal purposes, and states might have different classifications for the same people.

Reference

What many philosophers have sometimes offered as a better approach to rejecting a category is to use the notion of reference. A term refers to something. When you use a word, you do have in mind something that you mean, but sometimes you can refer to something even if you get the facts wrong about what you are thinking is true about it. For example, you might point to someone across the room and say, “That woman over there in the blue shirt is really tall.” If it turns out it’s not a woman but a man with long hair that you mistakenly thought was a woman, you have still referred to him, even though you thought you were speaking of a woman. You pointed directly at him, and that successfully pinpointed who you meant, even though you misgendered him.

Similarly, maybe you somehow got the idea that hoverboards actually hover from watching the Back to the Future movies from the 1980s, where they had hoverboards from the future that actually did hover. So when your friend says they got a hoverboard, you pictured them riding a skateboard-looking thing that hovers over the ground. Then you ask them what color their hoverboard is, and they tell you it’s black. So you now add more detail to your picture of the hoverboard actually hovering. It's a black skateboard with no wheels that hovers. When you ask them about their hoverboard that you falsely think will hover, do you successfully refer to it, even though you got something important wrong about it? It seems so. When they answer that it’s black, it does seem that they have answered your question and have succeeded at communicating. You still have a wrong idea about it, but they communicated something true about it, and you understand that statement just fine.

So it doesn’t seem like getting the nature of a hoverboard wrong prevents you from referring to it. Similarly, why should we think getting the nature of races wrong (thinking of them as biological categories) would mean there must be no races to refer to? They could be something other than what we wrongly think they are, and it would still be meaningful to talk about them. In fact, even if we get the nature of races wrong, it seems we still have a relatively good idea of which people are in which ones. Isn’t that group of people then the one refer to when we use racial terms? If so, then anti-realism seems to be making a mistake. Races might not be what we thought they were, but it doesn’t follow that there is no such thing as races. We might just be getting it wrong about what they are if we think of them as biological categories.

The One Human Race View

I should say something also about a related but distinct view. Some people present a view that in some ways is like anti-realism, but it doesn't deny the existence of any races. It denies the existence of multiple races. It holds that there is one human race. Everyone is all part of the same race. In one sense, this is certainly not anti-realism. Anti-realists think there are no races, and this view thinks there is exactly one race. But it's like anti-realism in denying the races that we ordinarily believe in. None of those races exist, according to this view.

The problems with anti-realism also appear for this view. The arguments for anti-realism are not good arguments, and the reasons they give for thinking there are no races will also fail if they are put to show that there is only one race. And if there are reasons to think we communicate just fine by using racial terms, since we succeed at communicating when we use such terms, then the same argument works against the One Race view as well.

But I think this view also has a further problem. It fundamentally misunderstands what races are supposed to be. Races are supposed to be sub-categories of a species, not the species itself. You can't very well reject races because we got their nature wrong and then retain one race and in the process again get the nature of a race wrong. It's inconsistent to reject races from this biological argument and then to say that there is one race by identifying that one race with a species. Before the modern concept of race came along, people might have used the term that way. Tolkien, fond of archaic use of language, used it that way to distinguish the race of Man from the races of Dwarves, Elves, Hobbits, Orcs, and Ents. I found a passage from Jonathan Edwards, writing before the modern concept of race had infiltrated the American colonies, where has something like this. But the word "race" has not really been used to refer to the human species since that time, outside of fantasy literature influenced by Tolkien or writers steeped in pre-modern reflections on these things. So the One Race view seems to me to get the word as wrong as Classical Biological Racial Realism does. There is one human species, sure. But to take the human species to be a race, in the sense that the English word "race" is normally used, is to make a major semantic error. That's not what the word refers to in ordinary use.

They Do Exist but Aren't Races

They anti-realist view that I think has the most going for it is Joshua Glasgow's view., most prominently defended in his 2009 book A Theory of Race, which in my view was a game-changer in this debate in terms of how anyone needed to talk about this issue. Glasgow argues that there are no races, but the reference argument I gave above convinces him that there are groups that we refer to when we use racial terminology. When we talk about black people, say, there is a group of people (with admittedly vague boundaries when it comes to mixed race and so on) that our terms refer to. He just then insists that such groups are not races. His view has changed a little since then, and maybe I'll get to his current view in a later post, but I want to think about the view he defended in his book right now.

Suppose he is right that races have to be biological entities, but there are no such entities. It doesn't follow that the groups we have been calling are races do not exist, as I have argued above. But on his view, then, these groups are not races. I have resisted that above, and our next post will get into some more reasons why we might resist that. But I should note that Glasgow has basically conceded most of what makes the anti-realist view distinctive. He is saying that there is such a group as black people, another group as white people, and another group that consists of Asians. He is accepting that those groups are real, which is what anti-realism wanted to deny. 

And I should say that this is what anti-realists have retreated to at this point. They don't deny the existence of the groups that people call races. They just don't call them races. You will still get what I will now call the classic anti-realist view, but many who have questioned the existence of races take this approach now. Kwame Anthony Appiah, who was the first philosophers to begin looking at this question since the early 20th century, famously defended anti-realism in several works. But he has retreated to the view that there are racial identities that we falsely call races but that do exist. Another anti-realist, Lawrence Blum, denies that there are races but calls the groups that everyone calls races by another name -- racialized groups. The groups exist, and we have racialized them, meaning that we think about them as races, even though in his view they are not races.

One response to Glasgow (and any similar position) is that the approach is willing to admit to the group but just failing to use the term everyone else uses. It’s like refusing to call atoms by that name, once it’s clear that they are divisible, all the while recognizing that they exist. But we did continue to use the name, because we referred to them as atoms in a way independent of the theory that led to thinking they were indivisible. We referred to them as atoms because they explained chemical interactions, and that reasoning still worked to allow us to refer to them, even if we had gotten their nature wrong. 

It reminds me of the Stoic philosophers of ancient Greece and Rome, who mislabeled emotions as not being emotions because it didn’t fit well with their definition of emotions. They were so convinced that emotions are all bad that they had trouble dealing with some that seemed not to be. Anger is bad in some of its clearest case, so they were fine with that, but what about righteous indignation, which looks just like anger but is motivated by moral concern and recognition that terrible things are being done? The Stoic response was to say that certain things that we call emotions are not really emotions but just good feelings, because they’re compatible with good reasoning, and by their definition emotions are not compatible with good reasoning.

What's going on here is that the Stoics gave a bad definition of emotions. Someone came up with a counterexample, which should normally get them to admit they had a bad definition, and that should lead them to offer another one, one that allows some good emotions. But they stubbornly resisted redefining the term in a way that fit with how emotion-language is actually used. So they point to these good feelings and accept them as fine but refuse to call them emotions. Later philosophers, such as Cicero and Augustine, had a lot of fun pointing out how absurd the Stoics were on this question. They were simply getting their own language wrong and confusing everyone, since everyone knew full well that righteous indication is an emotion. It led people to think that Stoics really did believe all emotions are wrong. They didn't. They just believed that a narrower set of emotions is entirely wrong, while other things everyone calls emotions are not really emotions. So they said this extreme-sounding thesis that no one understood without reading them very carefully, and it could all have been avoided by using language the way everyone else did. The similar lesson with race-language is simply to use it the way everyone does, which means defining it in a way that Glasgow prefers not to do, at least in his book. (He has backed off on this in more recent work, but his current view is complex and relies on notions that we will get to in the next post about social kinds.)
​

It is for reasons along those lines that many philosophers today think races are not nonexistent biological entities but still are some existing thing. But what existing entities would they be? The most common answer is that they are socially defined entities like philosophers, college students, atheists, electricians, licensed motor vehicle operators, and football players. We’ll turn to the social kind view of race next time.

This is the second post in my series on the metaphysics of race. To start at the beginning, go to the Introduction post.

Biological race realism was the dominant view from the time of the slave trade until the mid-20th century. What a lot of people don't realize is that it was not really even a view until the modern period, starting around the time of 18th century German philosopher Immanuel Kant, who contributed to its development as a view. The ancient Mediterranean region that gave birth to what we call the Western tradition did not have a concept of race, as we understand that term today. They certainly distinguished between different cultural ethnicities and political nations. They didn't unify all people with a certain skin color and other external features as belonging to one group called a race, however. It wasn't really until the European slave trade that there was a European concept of race the way we use that term today. That doesn't by itself mean that there isn't something that our race terms refer to. It doesn't mean that there isn't something biological that our race terms refer to. After all, we didn't have a concept of electrons until modern chemistry, and that term still refers to a scientific reality. We didn't have a concept of DNA until 70 years ago, but that still refers to a biological reality. So the mere fact that the modern concept of race developed fairly recently in the grand scheme of things is not a good argument that there is no such thing as race. So let's take a look at the modern concept of race that developed.

As I said, the modern biological view of race developed during the time Europeans were trying to justify their practice of enslaving Africans. There is no question that the intention of justifying slavery was part of why they wanted to classify people in racial groups. Immanuel Kant puts it to that use explicitly, although his later work gives some indications that he may well have changed his mind completely on the permissibility of enslaving Africans. We will have to come back to that issue later. The fact that racial categories formed with immoral and unfactual claims as part of it plays a large role in some anti-realist arguments, so keep it in mind.

On the classic biological realist view, races can simply be read off the facts of our biology. There are a few different ways people have tried this, but the early view was before anyone knew anything about DNA. One common notion was the idea of a racial essence, whereby something in your makeup includes this essence that you have because of your membership in a certain racial group, and all members of that group will therefore have certain features by being in that group. Some of these proposed features within racial essences would be easily recognized today as being racist. They included intelligence, moral capabilities, and even moral worth as part of what the racial essence determines. So slavery could be justified if black Africans have lower intelligence and can't decide on their own what makes a good life for themselves, are unable to partake in a moral community as equals, and are not of the same value that other people are. The views that you will find if you look at the primary sources on this from that period would place the different racial groups into hierarchies in terms of who has more intelligence, moral capability, and moral worth and then who has less, and there will be different levels on that hierarchy for different races.

I think it's also important to point out that these early writings on race did not usually state exactly the same groups we call races today. Some of them were more fine-tuned, corresponding more to groups we would call ethnicities today. Some of them were broader and focused more on color and broader geographical regions. It isn't really until the 20th century that you got a solidification into the categories we now see as the races today. In fact, there is good evidence that there was a fight about whether Irish and Italian people in the United States would count as white. I think a lot of people overstate this, including the most influential book on the issue, but there were people who wanted to refuse Italian and Irish immigrants the ability to consider themselves white. Some of our best sources on this thought that idea was utterly ludicrous, however, which makes me think the mainstream view at the time did consider them white. In any case, these categories changed over the course of the development of the modern concept of race. There was a court case in the middle of the 19th century that concluded that "black" meant non-white, and so Chinese people were black. The same court also declared that Chinese people were American Indians because of the expectation from the land bridge theory that the two groups had common ancestry. This court case set a murderer free, because the race of witnesses was at issue, since only white witnesses counted by California law at that time. There were inconsistent rulings in the early 20th century on whether Arabs, Armenians, and Syrians counted as white. In 1922 the Supreme Court declared that a Japanese immigrant was not white, because "white means Caucasian," but then in a subsequent case when an Indian immigrant argued that Indians from the Punjabi region were Caucasian based on the original use of that term, the Supreme Court said no. That sense of "Caucasian" has to do with linguistic roots, and the racial one has to do with skin color. People's citizenship was at stake in these decisions. 65 people who had become naturalized citizens actually lost it because of that case. (I should note that this case is sometimes misrepresented, however. It's not that only white people could become citizens, and everyone else was forced outside citizenship. It's that only white and black people could become citizens, and those who were in between those two groups on the hierarchy of the time were not allowed to become naturalized citizens.)

So there's a complicated development of where our racial categories came from, and that will play a role in the idea of a social construction when we come to that. So hold on to this information as relevant data. But the main idea that had developed by the early 20th century is relatively clear and consistent. People were conceiving of race as a biological category. There was a whole "science" of race that formed trying to justify the different notions of a racial essence and how it led to both the variations we actually see (skin color, hair type, bone structure, facial shape) and the variations people just made up (intelligence differences, character differences, moral capabilities, moral worth). They developed a branch of pseudoscience called phrenology that measured skulls and drew conclusions about intelligence. In the 19th century they thought percentages of racial something or other would be found in blood, and they took talk of how much blood you had of a certain racial group to be getting at something literally correct in science. It was a startling revelation to discover in 1900 that blood types do not track with racial categories. They had to reconceive of what racial essences were supposed to be, but that notion continued on as what was seen as a scientific idea until the discovery of DNA five decades later.

But here is the core idea of biological racial realism. Races can be read off biology. That's it. That's the main thesis. You can do your biology and look at different people, and biology will simply tell you which races there are. They threw all sorts of other things into it, many of them racist, some of them perhaps not so much. But the core idea was that the racial lines are written into nature. In the concepts of philosophy, races are a natural kind. The idea of a natural kind goes back at least to Plato, who spoke of certain ways of thinking as carving nature at its joints, whereas other ways of thinking do not line up with the way things are actually organized in nature. Electrons are a genuine category in nature, because nature is already divided along lines of fundamental particles, such as protons, electrons, quarks, and leptons. We don't bring that to nature. It's already there. Plumbers, on the other hand, are not a natural kind. We divide people into plumbers and non-plumbers. That's a social category, not a biological one. You couldn't know if someone is a plumber by looking at their DNA or other biological features.

For a more controversial case but one that is very familiar to many of us, biological sex is natural in this sense, because that has to do with several elements really present in nature -- X chromosomes, Y chromosomes, sexual organs of different types, and so on. The fact that we have some cases that don't as clearly fit into the male-female binary is irrelevant to this issue. If I get into sex/gender issues in a later series of blog posts, maybe I can deal with that. But the important point here is that biological sex categories look at stuff that is actually in nature to form the divisions into categories, whereas classifying people according to how they dress, what activities they engage in, what pronouns they prefer you to use for them, and so on does not categorize people in biological ways. It categorizes people in terms of social behavior, internal desires, or expectations we bring to the table. But looking at X-chromosomes, the presence of ovaries or testicles, and so on is looking at genuinely biological phenomena.

So what biological thing is it that races are supposed to be, on the biological racial realist view?  Until we discovered DNA, people thought it was fairly obvious. There is some racial essence that explains the obvious physical appearance differences between the races. And they also thought it would explain the other differences, the ones we today would say are racist. But once DNA was discovered, it no longer made sense to think there is a racial essence. I will present that argument in more detail when we get to social kinds, but the basic argument is this. One of the main reasons scientists stopped believing in biological races in the middle of the 20th century is that sub-species groups in other species have a much higher degree of variation between groups than human sub-populations do, What counted as a race or a sub-species group was a group much more distinct genetically than human racial groups are. Human racial groups are far more diverse within themselves than the amount of diversity between groups. The amount of variation between racial groups is tiny compared to the amount of diversity within each race. To put it another way, if you looked at the overall amount of diversity in humanity, and then you looked at how much of that diversity appears in each racial group, it would be almost all of it. The few traits that are distinctive of each racial group are surface-level and relatively insignificant biologically. There is an arbitrariness to them, biologically speaking. They don't seem to carve nature at the joints. So biologists simply concluded that there are no races, biologically speaking. And this is like the 1950s, when DNA was discovered. The civil rights era is only at its beginning at this point, with Brown v Board in place but much still to come.

But when philosophers finally decided to come back to this question in the 1990s, the first thrust of work in this area came to the same conclusion. It followed the science and recognized that the classic racial realist view grounded in biology did not work. If race is biological, and there are no biological races, then there are no races at all. So we will look at the anti-realist view in the next post.

This is my first post in a series on the metaphysics of race. There is a list of all the posts in the series, with links.


I've wanted for a long time to do a blog series on the metaphysics of race, which is my primary area of research. This is what I wrote my Ph.D. dissertation on, which has now been published as a book and has entered the current discussion among philosophers on race. I've been teaching this issue since 2004, and I've finally gotten to a point where I have a set of readings that I really like for introductory classes, and the main content I teach has coalesced into a stable form that I am using every semester now instead of trying something, getting frustrated by it, and not trying it again for a few semesters. I'm finally getting around to turning it into a blog series, because the covid-19 distance learning required me to type up my class lectures into a presentable form, so I now have a set of written materials that I can convert into a bloggable format. So here we go.

There are a number of philosophical issues related to race, but the topic here is the metaphysics of race, which just means looking at the nature of what (if anything) race is. In philosophy, metaphysics is just the nature of reality. It looks at questions about what kinds of things there are and what we can say about them. Metaphysics includes whether God exists, what kind of being God is if God does exist, whether we have immaterial souls that could survive death, whether we have free will and if so what free will even is, whether free will is compatible with being predetermined or with an omniscience being knowing what we will do, whether time travel is possible, the nature of space and time, whether a computer or AI can understand or be conscious, what it means for one thing to cause another thing, and lots of other important questions worth thinking about philosophically. Is a hole, a ditch, or a dent a real thing? Or is it just the absence of certain things or some other thing being formed in a certain way? Is there something about the nature of reality that explains why moral truths are true? These are all metaphysical questions.

But metaphysics also includes a number of questions that we sometimes classify under social philosophy, such as what it means to fall under the category of being a man or being a woman. Questions of sex, gender, gender identity, and gender expression are metaphysical questions (ones with serious ethical implications, but whether a transwoman is a woman is a metaphysical question, and which pronouns we should use for a transgender person or how we should treat such a person are ethical questions; some questions of social philosophy are metaphysics, and some are ethics, and what you say about some of those questions might affect what you say about others). What it means to have a disability and whether that means something is missing or distorted that ought to be present but is not involves metaphysical questions. Are all differences mere differences, or is there some aspect of reality that makes certain differences worse in some sense? Are there certain ways of being that are worse or better than other ways of being? These are all metaphysical questions about the social realm, involving questions about the nature of the categories we use, such as sex, gender, or disability.

So what about race? We can ask what sort of thing races are, assuming they even exist. Are there even such things as races? If so how would we figure out what kind of things they are? Those are the fundamental questions in the metaphysics of race.

There have been three main approaches to this question since philosophers started applying their concepts to the subject, which wasn’t all that long ago. The first attempt in recent times that I’m aware of by a philosopher was the early 1990s by Kwame Anthony Appiah, although others had used philosophical categories to answer this question long before that, and philosophers of earlier times did explicitly raise this question. In the most famous cases, they did so through lenses that most of us would now consider pretty distorted. Before Appiah, English-speaking philosophy as a whole would probably not even have seen this as a philosophical question and certainly would not have wanted to treat it as metaphysics. Even now, it's probably not going to be found in most lists of metaphysical questions, although most philosophers now recognize it to be a genuinely philosophical question. But most would see it not as a fundamental question of metaphysics but as a question of applied metaphysics, the same way theories about what morality is all about would be ethical theory and then questions about abortion might be applied ethics. But if you go back a couple hundred years, the 20th century exclusion of questions of race from philosophy would seem strange. Immanuel Kant was perhaps the most influential philosopher in continental Europe in his time, and he spent many pages writing about race. Indeed, many historians of the race concept place him as one of the most important thinkers to have developed the modern concept of race.

The three main approaches metaphysicians of race today present are the biological realist view, the social realist view, and the anti-realist view. Biological realism and social realism about races both accept the existence of races as real entities, but they disagree on what sort of thing they think races are. Biological realists take races to be naturally occurring, biological categories. Social realists think there are no such biological races, but they think races are real nonetheless. They are instead social entities, created by social forces and determined by such things as how we as a society end up classifying people. By contrast, anti-realists just think racial language doesn’t refer to anything at all. It’s a mistake to think there are races to begin with.

So I will proceed to look at each of these views. I will start with what I call the classic biological approach, which was the main view until about early-mid 20th century. The discovery of DNA and subsequent thought about species and sub-species basically eliminated the class biological approach among those who understood and were influenced by science. Anti-realism dominated for most of the second half of the 20th century and was perhaps the most prominent approach among the first philosophers to go back to including this issue in their discussions, but late 20th century arguments for a social realist view, which takes to be real but not biological, eventually led to that view dominating both in the social sciences and in philosophy once philosophers went back to looking at the question. A few biological approaches developed in the 1990s but didn't catch on, but a new one developed in the last 20 years that has become a viable view at this point, and we will see how that new biological approach relates to social realism (and why the two might even be compatible). But next up is the classic biological racial realist position.

Implicit bias is a well-documented phenomenon. Careful studies have shown lots of lots of implicit biases that we have. Most of them are only tiny. The effects are demonstrable but not huge. If we are evaluating a resume, we are slightly more likely to see someone with a name that we expect to be black to be less competent than we would if we saw the same resume with a name attached to it that we would not have any racial associations with (and thus we might assume the person to be white). Police officers are slightly more likely to see a cell phone or wallet as a gun if the person holding it has darker skin. These biases are just as present, or nearly as present, in populations affected by these stereotypes. For example, black police officers have a similar bias to that of white police officers in the case I just described.

If the effects are tiny, why do we care? Because the effect is demonstrable when you look at lots and lots of cases. Implicit biases can explain disproportionate effects without relying on accusing the people involved of being racists. They just have the biases that we all have. Certain groups have a stigma attached to them, and it lowers our expectations that someone in that group will be as competent. This stereotype affects members of that group as much as it affects everyone else. In fact, all it takes is knowing that the stereotype exists, and you are likely to display this implicit bias. Nor does it occur in a lower frequency among those with a more progressive agenda. Believing the stereotypes to be false does not help remove the bias, although being more intimately connected relationally with people who are in the stigmatized group can sometimes help reduce some of these biases.

None of this is new. Psychologists have been aware of this for several decades and have been publishing careful work refining our understanding of what's going on throughout that time. But every once in a while I see something about an implicit bias that goes along surprising lines or stems from more complex causes. I have found one that deals with a stereotype within a stereotype. I was directed to one a while back that is very interesting but not quite in the way it's described in the article. The headline suggests that it shows that women and minorities are punished for caring about diversity. If that means anyone is deliberately punishing them, then it's completely the wrong idea. If it just means there is an implicit bias against women and minorities who care about diversity, that's much closer to what they have found. But I think the explanation they offer for this is very unlikely to be correct, and what seems to me to be a more likely explanation involves a very interesting hierarchy of embedded biases.

I’m part of a Facebook group that discusses the teaching of philosophy, and every once in a while someone says something that I really want to comment on, but it would move enough away from the conversation and be very long and just feel out of place. I found myself writing a very long comment this morning about something that I think should be preserved, but I ended up not posting it to that conversation, because it’s really off point and probably wouldn’t be appropriate to pick out one side comment and turn it into a lengthy issue. But I think what I have to say about it is worth posting, so here it is.

The conversation was about a student who engaged in inappropriate behavior in class to support (but not actually defend) his view that morality is connected with religion. He actually stood up and looked around at the class to assert his view, as if he could win people over by the sheer force of saying it. One of the commenters pointed out that movies like God Is Not Dead probably fuel perceptions of a liberal and secular bias in philosophy classes, and to someone who has seen that movie and has no familiarity with philosophy they might think philosophy classes are actually like that and see this kind of behavior as an appropriate response. (Hint: philosophy classes are usually nothing like what that movie portrays, and this kind of behavior is totally inappropriate in a philosophy class.)

Someone else came along and mentioned a case where her insistence on using proper terminology led to a student’s parents accusing her of inappropriate bias in her teaching. That’s unfortunate when that happens, and I actually think in the case these parents were pushing back against they were wrong. But the case started from something preventable that I think would predictably lead to that perception in a lot of people.
​

Some of the early reports about yesterday's report from the Vatican conference on family issues seem to me to betray a serious misunderstanding of Catholic teaching on these issues. In the NPR story I just linked, we see two views being put into contrast that I don't think any Catholic who understands the concepts involved would recognize as being in conflict. On the one hand, Catholics have long taught that homosexuality and same-sex sexual relationships are intrinsically disordered, and Catholics insist on the wrongness of any sexual relations outside marriage. On the other hand, this report speaks of Catholic communities "accepting and valuing their sexual orientation" and "positive aspects to a couple living together without being married". It all depends on the context and what is meant by these expressions, but I see no reason yet to take these in a way that contradicts anything in Catholic teaching.

The crucial element is the concept of intrinsic disordering. If something is intrinsically disordered, it means that the good in the relationship is put together wrongly in some way. It means either something is missing, or the parts are not working together the way they ought to. But the concept of intrinsic disordering requires there to be some good, since intrinsic disordering means something is less good, as opposed to some positive evil being introduced, which is impossible on an Augustinian conception of evil that serves as the basis of the notion of intrinsic disordering.

You can't have something intrinsically disordered that doesn't have some positive good. No positive good means no existence. Intrinsic disordering means a disordering of positive good. That means there is positive good. And that means this change in emphasis isn't a change in doctrine, if all it's saying is that there is some positive good in same-sex relationships and in unmarried couples living together (implying sexual relations).

In particular, you can think value all manner of things about a same-sex relationship: you can recognize the good in a couple's self-sacrifice for each other, the good in their parenting of any children they might have, the good in the degree to which they fulfill their desire for companionship, even some level of good in the sexual pleasure they provide each other. You can do that even if you think the relationship itself is immoral and if you think they're seeking the wrong object to fulfill sexual desires and the wrong ways of fulfilling their companionship needs. You couldn't think they are good in every respect, but you have to think there is some good there, or else there would  be nothing. That follows from the very notion of intrinsic disordering.

Similarly, the Catholic church holds that there are good things in opposite-sex sexual relationships between unmarried people. Catholic doctrine declares such relationships immoral. There is a difference in that they're not disordered in terms of the object of sexual desire (or at least in terms of the sex of the object of sexual desire). But there's plenty of intrinsic disordering of a different sort in those relationships (e.g. the marital status of the two people, which is an issue to do with the object of one's desire, just not about the person's sex). Most importantly, the person and relationship are placed on a higher level than God, because they refuse to honor God's command to marry before having sex. That is an intrinsic disordering, since it demonstrates one's desires are not well-ordered, which is what virtue is on an Augustinian view. Any sin is an intrinsic disordering, since it involves a disordering within one's desires. That assumes some good in the desiring and in the fulfillment. Otherwise there would be no desiring or fulfillment.

Compare the intrinsic disordering of a shoe fetish. What's disordered about that is that shoes are not an appropriate object of sexual desire. Homosexuality, by contrast, involves a desire for a human being. Human beings are the appropriate objects of human sexual desire in general, even if there is some intrinsic disordering when it involves same-sex desires. That means there's something good about same-sex desire that isn't present for the shoe fetish. It's not clear to me that the Catholic statement is doing anything more than acknowledging things like that. That's compatible with thinking same-sex relationships are intrinsically disordered to the point of being immoral. I think people who don't have a view like the Catholic view will be inclined to think that anyone who thinks homosexuality is intrinsically disordered must think it the height of all evil, with nothing redeemable or good about it, but that's simply not what the view holds. Many who hold the Catholic view might not see this, but there's a difference between how proponents of a view understand it and what the official view is, at least when you're talking about a view held by those who believe their views come from some authoritative source. (The No True Scotsman fallacy is simply not an issue when you have an authoritative person, text, or organization that determines what the official view is. There is a genuine Catholic position, and those who don't hold that view do not hold the Catholic view.)

There may be a different emphasis here, but it's not at odds with thinking the relationship is intrinsically disordered anymore than the idea that it's good to support our troops is at odds with being opposed to a particular conflict they've been fighting in. So don't believe anyone claiming that this is a change in Catholic doctrine. It's not a conflict or departure from the concept of intrinsic disordering. It in fact brings to the fore something that follows from the notion of intrinsic disordering. Perhaps that's something that those who believe homosexuality is intrinsically disordered should be emphasizing more. But it's not a new position. It even follows from the idea of intrinsic disordering. Anyone claiming the two are at odds simply doesn't understand what it means to be intrinsically disordered, or they couldn't think that.

I've several times now run across a new linguistic trend, mostly among a certain brand of academic. When writing about people we would normally call slaves, the new trend is to call them "enslaved people". I assume the reasoning here is because we don't want to define someone by their enslavement, as if it's an identity-forming feature of their existence, and we shouldn't let someone in one of the most oppressive situations be defined by something entirely outside their control that has demeaning connotations. In that way, it reflects some of the concerns of person-first language, which I've usually encountered in the context of disabilities. 

[See my critique of person-first language. It's a bit over-the-top, as most satire is. The sense you get from it about what my views must be is not quite what they are. I'm not completely opposed to person-first language, and I even think sometimes it's the best way to go in certain settings. I would say that with small children it's far better to speak that way, whereas with older children and adults it's best to help them understand the categories we in fact use while drawing attention to the ways we illegitimately think about those categories and ways we process them unconsciously and thus denigrate the people we're talking about without always being aware of it.]

But this is different. For one thing, this isn't person-first language. Person-first language would not speak of enslaved people. It would speak of people with enslavement or people encumbered by, trapped by, oppressed by, or otherwise affected by enslavement. Person-first language is so roundabout, awkward, and unworkable that even those tempted to apply it in this case have actually refused to go that far. They will avail themselves of adjectives rather than nouns and use the adjectives to modify the noun 'people' or 'person'. It's grammatically parallel to "deaf people" or "autistic people" rather than "people without hearing" or "people with autism". But it's certainly a step in the direction of person-first language when compared with calling people slaves. The only grammatical equivalent is to speak of the deaf with no noun or to talk about people with autism as autists. [I should note that that's a bad idea even if there weren't any other problems with the term, because people will just think you're from Brooklyn or the Bronx and talking about people with very creative abilities and outlets.]

But there are differences, and I think some of them matter morally. One is that ordinary language does allow for slaves, and "enslaved people" is awkward, whereas "autistic people" or "people with autism" are both common, while "autists" is not. Another is that it's generally accepted that calling someone an autist is unacceptable, and it's at least not generally unacceptable to call someone who is enslaved a slave. That's not the only issue, but that's a difference. For example, it was much worse to call people retarded once that became a standard insult for people without any cognitive disabilities than it was when it was the accepted term and had not yet been used as an insult. Whether it was a good term ever is something people can debate, but surely it's made worse once it becomes used as an insult. So the fact that a lot of people do oppose a way of speaking does count more against it, and the fact that many people approve of a way of speaking does mean there's less to count against it, whatever else is true.

Another difference is that one is a disability and the other is an imposed condition. Both are involuntary, at least in most cases of slavery. Slavery can be accepted voluntary, especially in cases of indentured servanthood, selling oneself into slavery to pay off a debt, or accepting slavery to avoid a death penalty (well, that's at least not completely involuntary, although it's not actually a range of choices that anyone would consider sufficient for the choice to be fully voluntary). But one is known, at least by most people today, to be something that is not central to who one is but rather imposed. No one today, at least no one I personally know, thinks that anyone who is a slave is the sort of person whose slavery is necessary because they couldn't otherwise function in life. No one thinks slaved naturally deserve slavery. No one thinks it's part of a slave's nature to be a slave.

This is not true with racial categorizations. As much as we might discover scientifically about how there isn't all that much difference between different racial groups, we do process racial categories with stigmatized stereotypes, and scientific studies for decades now have consistently shown that these stereotypes and stigmatized categories will affect how we treat people, at least in small ways that most of us don't pick up on (and especially in situations where we're tired or busy and have to make decisions quickly without thinking carefully about them). This isn't true of the category "slave" even if it is true of other contingent categories. If I find out someone is a slave, I'm not going to process that the way I do if I find out they receive welfare, are homeless, or grew up in a ghetto. Whether I want to or not, I will make assumptions about the person if I discover they're in one of those other categories, and I won't if I find out someone had kidnapped and enslaved them. We're distant enough from the 19th-century practice of slavery (and what does go on today is both under the radar and officially disapproved of) that we just don't respond that way anymore.

So one of the important reasons for avoiding linguistic constructions that serve to foster innatist, essentialist thinking (which really only matters with small children anyway, according to the most careful psychological studies) does not matter with slavery. That means any argument for preferring "enslaved people" to "slaves" must have to do with how people in those categories would perceive it, not how others will be influenced by speaking or hearing the construction. And I suspect the same debate that occurs with disability would crop up here. People who prefer "person with autism" are usually parents, teachers, and psychologists who want to encourage not defining someone by the disability and who want others to respect them as people, taking their interests and desires as important, assuming competence first before assuming incompetence, and other essential features of treating someone as a person. Yet one can do that while using the word "autistic" as an adjective.

The other side is usually from people who have the condition who have the communication skills to express their view on the matter. They in fact prefer to be called "autistic" as an adjective, just as the deaf community generally prefers to be called "deaf" and thinks person-first language is insulting. Why is that? Because they see their condition (which they don't always see merely as a disability, because it involves both impairments and increased abilities) as something very important to who they are. It shouldn't define them as if it's the only thing that matters, but it is part of how they've formed their identity, just as race is for anyone who isn't in the dominant majority racial group in their social location. White people in the U.S. don't see whiteness as part of their identity, because it's part of white privilege not to be affected by race is ways that make you constantly think about those categories. Most members of other racial groups in the U.S. do consider their race to inform their sense of their own identity in significant enough ways that they wouldn't want people not to think of them according to those categories, as the dishonest color-blind ideal (does anyone really think they can pretend not to see race?) would have it.
​
How should this affect calling people "slaves" vs. "enslaved people"? Well, not having the chance to interview a bunch of people in that category, I just have to guess, but my suspicion is that it's going to be like race and disability, at least in terms of how they think of their identity while enslaved. It's pretty all-defining of what their life is. I can't see how that wouldn't be identity-forming. It's certainly more easily removed than the other cases I've been discussing, and that's why we can speak of people as former slaves. But that linguistic option show that we can handle the contingency of the category while still availing ourselves of the ordinary way of speaking, and there is at least some moral argument for retaining the category rather than abandoning it, which gives me little reason to want to engage in a major effort to revise our language in a pretty large way.

I've discovered the need to adopt a new way of speaking about people who are recently-descended from Africans. We've learned in the last couple decades that we ought to emphasize someone's personhood above any other characteristic, and thus it's thoroughly immoral to use any adjective in front of 'person'. We need to use predicate nouns instead. We no longer have sad people, for example. We simply have people with sadness. We no longer have short people. We have people with shortness. We don't want to define people with sadness as if their sadness is more important than their personhood, so we have a moral obligation to put the noun form after the word 'person'. Grammar does always indicate metaphysics, after all.

One sphere of language in which this lesson has never been properly applied is in the area of race. Why are we still talking about black people, for instance? Do we really want to define people solely in terms of their race? Do we really want to signal that their blackness is so central to who they are that we're going to pretend that people with blackness aren't people? If we call them black people, then we are treating their blackness as if it's a greater part of our conception of people with blackness than their personhood is. People with person-firstness have instructed us that we should never put disability-related adjectives in front of a noun or pronoun referring to a person, because we don't want them identified with that condition. But we've also learned from the same people that having a disability is not negative, which means this policy is not because disabilities are bad. Therefore, we ought to apply it to other cases when something is not bad but might wrongly be taken by someone to be bad, just as we would apply it to things that are genuinely bad. If race is not to be a negative, then I am not a white person. I'm a person with whiteness. It does make it a little awkward to speak of people with Asianness or people with Australian-first-people-ness (i.e. what used to be called aboriginalness). But it's worth the awkwardness of expression to avoid any chance of identifying them with the racial or ethnic group whose membership they possess.

Even worse, it's especially pernicious to say that someone is black (or African-American or whatever racial term we might choose). After all, using predicate adjectives amounts to making identity statements rather than merely ascribing a property to someone the way we would have thought that adjectives in English, even predicate adjectives, do. It's much more preferable to say that someone has blackness than to say that she is black. People aren't anything except persons. I'm not philosophical. I have philosophicalness. Glenn Beck is not unfair to his political adversaries. He has unfairness to the people who have political adversariness with him. President Obama is not bad at speaking without a teleprompter. He has badness at speaking without a teleprompter. I shouldn't say that I am Christian. I'm a person who has Christianity. I shouldn't be identified with my faith. I should claim, rather, to possess the entirety of Christianity, as if it belongs to me. We need to avoid identifying people with any property ascribed to them other than personhood. It's much better to say that they possess the entirety of the thing that formerly we would have used to describe them.

For more explanation, please see here (except you can ignore the sections explaining how people with blindness and people with deafness have offendedness at the obviously-correct way to refer to them, and you certainly shouldn't read person-with-autism Jim Sinclair's reasons for disliking person-first language).